I do agree with the author on this point. America has been a nation in decline ever since.
What was once a great country with a can do attitude that had heroes who walked on the moon we have become a nation the views its hero as a pedophile who moon walked.
Leftists hate the pioneer culture of America. The culture we were born out of and still pumps within the veins of America’s best!
http://www.wvmetronews.com/index.cfm?func=displayfullstory&storyid=35003
Funding for NASA’s effort to get the U.S. back to the Moon has been cut from the $3.8 trillion federal budget President Barack Obama has submitted to Congress.
It’s a $100 billion cut to the Constellation program former President George W. Bush implemented. The goal was to develop a new kind of rocket that get Americans back to the Moon by 2020. Critics say the project was overbudget and behind schedule.
Former NASA Scientist and Author Homer Hickam, who is originally from McDowell County, says the payoff from such a trip to the Moon, though, would be much greater than the money invested in the effort.
“You can’t be a great country without doing great things and a great thing would be to return to the Moon and build a laboratory there and open it up to the world,” Hickam said on Tuesday’s MetroNews Talkline.
Hickam says he’s angry about the cut.
“It’s really a foolish decision to take away the goal of going back to the Moon. I can certainly see figuring out a better way of doing it, but simply to take away the goal, I think, is so shortsighted and so foolish that it’s almost breathtaking in its stupidity.”
At the same time the Moon plan is being cut, NASA is set to receive additional money in the proposed budget to develop new commercial spacecraft to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit. Private companies would play a larger role in developing those transport methods.
Hickam says he supports that part of the proposal, but without the Moon, he sees no reason for NASA.
“It’s essentially now an $18 billion slush fund to go off and do nothing,” Hickam said.
“You can see a lot of political payoffs that are about to occur, going out to universities and so on for a lot of paperwork and studies that will actually not result in cutting metal at all.”
Congress has to approve the President’s proposed budget.
WHAT?! No more fake moon landings? OUTRAGE!
Russia and China will continue their space programs. As their capability advances and the US lags, there will come a day when they are capable of inserting dominant space based weapons in orbit. Treaties will mean nothing at that point since the US will be incapable of enforcing them. The US will then face the abhorrent reality that Eisenhower predicted. Americans will look up to the light of a Russian (or Chinese) moon.
No mention of John Glen's publicity stunt (old man rides in the shuttle in exchange for his vote against impeachment).
Didn’t the Camelot King start the space race?
Every now and then a liberal’s true colors come out. It isn’t pretty....
While the author was a tad harsh in his critique, he made a lot of excellent points. On the other hand, you merely called him a name and mischaracterized his essay.
Perhaps, yes, we are hard-wired to hike to the top of the hill to peer into the next valley, or sail on the ocean until land recedes from the horizon. But that doesn’t mean we have to spend billions of dollars a year groping in the cosmos so that thousands of bureaucrats can keep their jobs. Bumbling in space costs money this family doesn’t have.
Our government needs to understand that there is no glorious future in space because they already spent it generations ago. As long as the welfare recipient is clogging the line in Wal-Mart, wasting my precious life because she did not select the precisely correct kind of generic condensed orange juice or the 2% milk instead of the approved whole milk, I refuse to think grandiose thoughts about sending some slick {retracted for profanity} astronaut to Mars.
And another thing, if the moon were made of purest refined plutonioum (much less cheese), it would still not be profitable with current technology to go fetch it. If we survive the Great Socialist Economic Implosion, then NASA resources should be spent on finding the cheapest way possible out of the gravity well and making it cheaper. We need a Northwest Passage or a Panama Canal at least, into space.